Digital Body Snatchers: A Pragmatist Perspective on Disembodiment of Participative Relationships in New Digital Lifeworlds

Abstract

Central to pragmatist naturalism is understanding experience as an embodied engagement within an environment. Also, social and participative relationships are embodied in locally shared experience and imaginaries. As notions of embodiment become mainstream, we are facing a trend that could render them obsolete. Humans begin to inhabit regions of the metaverse as disembodied avatars. They leave their physical identities behind to become tokenized actants in crypto worlds. Participative relationships suffer the same fate: public-key cryptography offers instruments that compete with analogue governance institutions, such as fiat money, personal identity, and intellectual property. This paper turns to science and technology studies and actor-network theory to translate classical pragmatist ideas to these new digital lifeworlds. Not only does this reveal the residual connection of digital worlds with physically embodied experience, it also invites the search for new participative relationships that may include human and non-human actants on a more equal footing.